Microsoft Creates Blog Platform

Microsoft Creates Blog Platform

10th Dec 09:28

Trying to break into a content management space dominated by WordPress and Google's Blogger, Microsoft (www.microsoft.com) has posted the preliminary code for its new open-source blogging platform Oxite.

According to Microsoft developer evangelist Jeff Sandquist's Monday blog post, Oxite is focused on being open source, compliant with web standards, and highly extensible, with the flexibility to run anything from blogs to big web sites. "Yes Virgina, you too can support web standards with the Microsoft Web Platform," he writes, (with a play on the famous "Is There a Santa Claus?" editorial printed in the New York Sun on September 20, 1897, to which the response was "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus").

A Tuesday report from UK technology site The Register showed less faith in Microsoft's holiday offering, noting that its open source claims are more fairy tale than reality. The Register reported that Microsoft's supposedly open-source code depot, CodePlex, where Oxite's Alpha code was published, had been the subject of scrutiny in October the company posted code to the site with licenses incompatible with the terms of the Open-Source Initiative.

Regardless, Microsoft's "lightweight sample" of Oxite is bound to excite a number of developers and web hosts who may consider incorporating it into web hosting packages alongside ever popular open-source CMS packages such as Drupal. Oxite, however, requires ASP.NET framework support.

As an example of Oxite's capabilities, the MIX Online community website (www.visitmix.com) for web designers and developers has created an innovative web space using Oxite to create its flying mushroom motif.

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